by MEXICO: "La Nueva Revolucion" may start tomorrow
Ernesto Cienfuegos
La Voz de AztlanLos Angeles, Alta California - June 7, 2006 - (ACN) Mexicans on both side of the border are very apprehensive about the future. The collective destiny of the Mexican people is presently in the hands of a few politicians in Mexico City and Washington D.C. What occurs tomorrow, or soon after, at "El Zocalo" in Tenochtitlan may determine the fate of the Mexican people, and possibly of all Latin America, for many generations to come.
Aztlan and Mexico are presently facing two major uncertainties. The first is the crisis that has arisen from the July 2 election of the next Mexican president and the second is what the US Congress will legislate concerning immigration reform. The fate of tens of millions of Mexicans is at stake. The huge marches and rallies that occurred in the USA by hundreds of thousands of Mexican and other Latino immigrants in March and May of this year could be dwarfed by what could occur in Mexico if a "Bush type" electoral scam is uncovered by socialist candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador at El Zocalo and Mexicans take to the streets seeking justice.
Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the Partido Revolucionario Democratico (PRD) has already objected to a large number of irregularities that he said occurred during the counting of the votes by the Instituto Federal Electoral (IFE). The IFE is charged with conducting elections in Mexico but it is staffed by mostly people from the ruling and conservative Partido Accion Nacional (PAN). The IFE has officially declared that the PAN candidate Felipe Calderón won the election by a mere .57 percentage point. This is after Andrés Manuel López Obrador had led in the polls and after he had led in the actual count 36.48 % to Calderón's 34.78 % up to when 85.76 % of the total votes cast had been counted. Suddenly the IFE and the media went silent and in the end, the IFE reported that Calderon was ahead in the count by a very small margin. Approximately 42 million Mexicans voted in the July 2 elections.
Historical records indicate that the PRD was cheated in the 1988 presidential elections by the then ruling Partido Revulocionario Institucional (PRI) and the people vowed, at that time, that it will never happen again. The PRD candidate Cuauhtemoc Cardenas was also leading in the count by a comfortable margin when suddenly the computer system used to count the votes mysteriously crashed. When the computers came back on line, Carlos Salinas de Gotari of the PRI, like Calderon did during the current election, jumped in front of the PRD candidate and declared president.
Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, in order to avert violence and a political crisis, conceded defeat and he urged his followers to do the same. It does not appear that Andrés Manuel López Obrador will do the same. He has urged his followers to congregate at El Zocalo tomorrow at 1730 hours. Considering that one of his major supporters , Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatistas, is in town, makes the demonstration tomorrow a particular volatile one. Also, the brutal PAN government repression of campesinos at Atenco on May 3 and 4 of this year is still fresh in the minds of many in Mexico City. In addition, there is presently an insurrection occurring against the state government of Oaxaca and university students throughout Mexico and at the UNAM are organizing and are planning protests against what they perceive to be fraudulent presidential elections.
There is great potential that a new Mexican revolution will commence at El Zocalo. If Andrés Manuel López Obrador lits the "spark" tomorrow or soon after, the events that will be unleashed will have great repercussions for us here in Aztlan and for the USA. There will be a huge unstoppable flood of Mexican immigrants coming across the border. Twenty thousand national guardsmen and border patrol agents would not be sufficient to stop the hundreds of thousands of new immigrants that will be joining their brethren on this side of the border. If this occurs, we here in Aztlan, will have the moral responsibility to assist and to help these political refugees in every way possible.
